Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus

Selena blushes. “Not usually. Do you always show off like that, with your knowledge of Latin?” Her eyes are downcast. But then she looks up with an even, self-assured strength. “I did not wish to have sex with him. Then my face accidentally ran into his fist, twice, and then… well, you know the rest. Thank you, by the way, for what you did. I’m in your debt.”

“It’s nothing. You’re probably not even a Jew, are you?”

She touches the gash on her right cheekbone. It’s stopped bleeding. She winces. “It was never about being a Jew or not being a Jew. He was only rejected and stupid.” Selena wears a long, maroon-colored skirt gathered above her waist, a blouse with tight sleeves, and no corset binds her bosom. This woman, Columbus finds out later, is a chambermaid. She’s gorgeous-apart from her injury, her skin is smooth, flawless, and her hair is an exotic tawny mane-yet she seems to have no awareness of her beauty, which only makes her more beautiful in his eyes. This is a woman with whom he would dearly love to dance-because life is also too short to dance with ugly women.

Selena and Juan move toward Columbus ’s table and Selena trips, lurches forward-falls hard. Both men can hear the dull thud of her body hitting the floor.

“Fuck,” she grunts. “These goddamned shoes.” She pulls herself up before Columbus can even start to think about moving to help her. Her top is covered with sawdust. Sprays of undone, sandy hair cover half her face, which is bleeding again. Still, Columbus finds himself completely enchanted by her-he feels a little light-headed.

Salvos appears with a jug of wine and places it in the middle of the table.

“The good stuff,” he says, smiling. He turns to leave and adds: “You drink on the house tonight.”

They sit down and Juan pours wine all around. “The big one,” he says, “was a soldier. Not a particularly well-trained soldier but the marking on his hand is indicative of a regiment from near here.”

“You’re very good with your sword, sir,” Selena says.

“Please, call me Columbus. And I’m no swordsman. I’m a navigator, a sailor. I have no idea how to fight. I barely know how to hold a sword.”

“But-”

“Sometimes,” Columbus says, “one only needs to be quick.”

“Surely you don’t think all women need saving? That we’re basically helpless, frail little creatures, and-” She stops, shocked at the intensity of her reaction. Her questioning mind flits to her ex-husband. Was that who Rolf was? Did Rolf save her? Or try to save her?

Columbus smiles. It’s a warm gesture-even-tempered and innocent. Not condescending. “But Selena did need saving. It was not a nice bar. Sometimes it takes the threat of violence to stop a greater violence.”

Consuela is immediately embarrassed. This is her patient. It’s just a story. She’s overreacting.

“I do not think you need saving, Consuela,” he says. “But I would not hesitate if you were in trouble.”

“I… Listen, I’m sorry. I… Of course, Selena needed some help. It was a good story. I’m curious, though. Exactly how many women does Columbus… do you, get to bed in this tale?”

“Some other time,” he says. “We shall have to talk about passion and love, love and passion. With some women, I shared passion; others, I loved. One mustn’t confuse the two.”

Later, at home, Consuela picks up her phone book and looks under S for Salvos, or any such derivation. But it wouldn’t be in the phone book anyway. Not a bar like this. Besides, he never actually named the bar. He just named the owner, or the manager. And the bar was in Valdepeñas, she reminds herself. She pulls a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, slips the point of the corkscrew into the soft cork, and starts to twist it in. She hesitates. That was five hundred years ago anyway, she thinks, before she catches herself. Jesus, Consuela, it’s a story. It’s just a goddamned story.

It’s around this time that Columbus finds the swimming pool and starts to swim. It’s mid-July. The temperature in Sevilla has been rising to forty-three degrees Celsius and higher every day for nearly a week, with no relief in sight. Columbus had been suffering from a cold for a week and was told to report to the steam room. He followed directions the best he could. But instead of the steam room in the south wing, along the bottom edge of the building, Columbus found the empty shell of a swimming pool. He almost falls into it after pushing between a stack of boxes and a pile of old bed frames. Abandoned, but more or less structurally intact, the pool at one time had been fed by an underground spring and a small stream. A fill pipe extended into the stream and was blocked by a rock. The stream, a combination of the spring and the original up-mountain trickle, was warm. A hot spring. Columbus was thrilled. He spent the day cleaning the pool, sweeping, and scrubbing, while Benito, one of the better orderlies, watched, read the newspaper, and watched some more. Before supper, Columbus removed the rock from the fill pipe and the water began to trickle into the empty receptacle.

Three days later, Columbus starts to swim. Each morning before breakfast, he and Consuela-or on her days off, Benito-would head for the pool. He swims laps for an hour, sometimes more. It’s a good steady workout. It gives him joy to move through the water. It becomes a morning ritual.

“When I am in the water, I almost forget I am not free,” he says to Consuela one morning, walking back to the main building.

“What would you do if you were free?”

“Sail west across the Western Sea to India, China, Japan. Drink much wine. Go fishing.”

He does not mention his family, or women. Consuela wonders why.

She has been keeping meticulous notes on Columbus and filing them with Dr. Fuentes. Columbus ’s sessions with Dr. Fuentes are infrequent. She wonders if the doctor is actually reading any of her reports.

Within three weeks, Columbus ’s body becomes leaner-his muscles, more concentrated. He seems happier. One morning, Consuela thinks she hears him humming. She can’t be sure, but what else could it have been? This little snippet of an almost-heard melody coming from him is not serious, or focused, or driven. It has lightness to it, and normally he is anything but light.

Columbus does not speak about the pool. Nor does Consuela. This silence is a facility of age. They are both old enough to know that in a bureaucracy, a beautiful, innocent thing like this pool can become desecrated. There would be rules and lifeguards, hours of operation, and probably forms to fill out. It’s better to just remain quiet. Benito assumes someone has approved the use of the pool. Consuela does not ask for permission. The pool was there but forgotten. Columbus is just using it. Once a week, Consuela gets up early and enjoys a thirty-minute swim, a luxurious, tepid immersion, before starting her day. This is a gift. She thinks of it as a gift from Columbus. She swims naked. She and Columbus, separated by a few hours, share the same warm water. Consuela does not swim laps. She flounders, drifts around in the water-perhaps she will pull the breaststroke from a childhood memory, swim to the end of the pool and then stop. Mostly, she delights in the feel of the silky, mineral-rich water.

On the morning of the feast day of Saint Clare, after Columbus swims his laps-eighty-six laps this morning-and after she leaves him in his room, Consuela finds an envelope in her mail slot in the nurses’ lounge. There are identical envelopes in every mail slot. Someone has given all the nurses tickets to the bullfights next weekend. Consuela, who has never been to a bullfight in her life, tells Columbus about the tickets and his face disappears into a memory. “Beatriz loved the bullfights,” he says. “The bullfights are how we met.”